Skip to main content

Bristol Festival of Ideas 2015


Coleridge Lecture:

Reimagining the City

By Melissa Harrison at Wills Memorial Building Reception Room, Bristol
2nd April 2015
Shelley thought “Hell is a city much like London” when he was writing in the early 19th century
1851 Urban population exceeded rural population in the UK, 1st time in the world that this had happened in a country.
It was thought city living “led to death of society”.
[I think that may have something to do with the Palace of Versailles culture.]
Today 82% live in urban environments with the following benefits:
·         Boosted immune response
·         Better mental health treatment
Birdlife saved in UK in 1962 by book “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson about the damaging effects of DDT use as a pesticide to the food chain.
·         Bird of prey who are at the top of the chain were affected by a build up of DDT in their bodies and the effect was that the egg shells became thin and lost integrity leading to a rapid decline in bird populations
Nowadays bees like to dwell in cities to escape from the neo-nicotinoids being used as pesticides in the countryside.
Buddleias are an example of a modern invasive plant into the urban environment that has had a beneficial effect on the environment:
·         Created and supporting an entirely new urban food chain
·         Proving invasive new species can be a good thing
Vision:

City dwellers can experience a new sense of wonder that exposure to nature will bring.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Notes from Energy & Utility Forum 2017

1. Robert Symons, CEO of Western Power Distribution said: “Energy demand could rise by 100% by 2030. Smart grids will be needed to manage electric vehicle charging so that the usage does not exceed the supply capacity at any time during the day.” 2. Spoke to Harry Vickers, Business Development Manager of Camborne Energy Storage, Camborne Capital at the Energy and Utility Forum in London on October 23rd 2017. He told me his company is working with Elon Musk to bring Tesla battery grid storage solutions to the UK. 3. Spoke to Sally Barrett-Williams, Chairman of Energy and Utility Forum on October 23rd, who said subsidies for solar projects had ended and her company’s focus has shifted to energy storage schemes. 4. Spoke to Simon Dowland, PhD, at 13:00 on Sunday 29th October, Simon is now working up in Cambridge at the Cavendish Physics Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, he is working in industry for the company Eight19 Ltd a spin off from a research project to bring ne...
Post a Comment
Read more

We are mighty full of ourselves now, aren't we?

Vice-President Communications, Anthony Gaskell OE. Formula 1 needs more money in it to go back to how it was before. They need to get more serious. This is reminiscent of the good old days, the jet-set life and clean country living, where furniture and furnishings were made to the highest possible standard and there was no compromise on quality. Bad eye sight is like bad posture, it can be corrected without drugs or mechanical support. Eye-sight is a skill just as much as it is a transient attribute, many Opticians and others would say that eye-sight degrades with age and I would call them eccentric as typically one can expect that eye-sight would improve with age unless there was a problem. Ageing is a disease. A white British man with a PIO card as a businessman in Dubai , disappointed at a meeting. It is believed that Indians are descended from white-skinned peoples and that the truest Indians still have the whitest...
Post a Comment
Read more

Thoughts of Grandma and Grandpa

Grandma and Grandpa at home in their 1 acre garden Grandpa was a scientist but no one paid him too much heed. He was a naval officer, Chief science officer, presumably naval lieutenant or, perhaps commander. I have never found out but I presume to have inherited the rank in British society. He had written about a voyage subsequent to WW2 where his ship promoted most ratings to officer rank, a 20 th century voyage of discovery where everyone made progress on their naval rank post war, so that most of the ships complement ended up as officers at the end of the voyage. This was led by a Rear-admiral so it must have all been legitimised by the mandarins at Whitehall. Grandpa never really approved of their pandering to communist sympathies. How many tweets make a twat again David Cameron? I think he was talking about Nick Clegg. #JokeOfTheDay my grandma thought I was an upper-class twit after I went to Eton. She thought it was more important to get a car and go on dates and make ou...
Post a Comment
Read more